Six Weird North Archetypes for Bastionland

With BastionJam ongoing, I'm working on a full sword & sorcery hack of Into the Odd/Electric Bastionland. I'm calling it Weird North, and it is inspired by various pulpy picaresque tales, as well as my deep-diving into the monolith that is Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea (2nd Edition). As to the latter game, it's too crunchy for my taste (though I'd totally still run and play it!), but the flavor is on point. The gazetteer in the back, alone, is a goldmine. But, my preferences being what they are, it's Into the Odd or some close derivative just about every time, so that's the mechanical mold into which I'm pouring this atmospheric pulp novella goodness.

Armor, Odilon Redon

Jason Tocci and I discussed on the Bastionland Discord recently that we were both tinkering with soft classes/soft progression for Chris McDowall's games--not so hard that it forces some abstract compartmetalization of the game, but just enough to carrot-on-a-stick players in different directions through organic means. Then we both chuckled as Chris simply posted a more refined version of the same idea himself with Paralegal Bastionland. Kudos to Chris, as it's his game after all! Paralegal Bastionland affords a concise, actionable template for similar ideas, so I've decided to directly adapt it to Weird North.

Talents: Divine and Weird

After looking at fighter/rogue and ranger/wizard talents for use in Knave and similar rules-light whatever-games, we come to cleric-analogues and... everything else. The "weird" list has made appearances across the blogopshere and seems to be the witchy/eldritch/esoteric bucket for various and sundry curious abilities. I've very much enjoyed what I've seen elsewhere, and tweaked and added my own thoughts to finalize what I'd like to leverage in terms of flavor and mechanics.

Talents: Survivalist and Arcane

In my last post riffing off of Knave and the idea of expanding the class-less structure to something akin to a talent tree or loose categories of "adventuring" perks, I looked at martial and specialist talents, roughly mapping to "fighter" and "rogue" archetypes. Today, I'm looking at survivalist and arcane talents, which are sorta-kinda like "rangers" and "wizards" except that my intent, overall, is to lean towards flavor and utility without rehashing tropes.

Talents: Martial and Specialist

Knave is fantastic. Everyone go buy it and enjoy. It's the post-retroclone retroclone, insofar as it's aim is to fundamentally streamline the B/X-era D&D formula into the most basic and accessible format possible. Ben Milton, the author, also notes that it thus assumes the position of ideal hack-able skellington for all manner of rules-light OSR frameworks. Knave assumes that no classes exist. Like Maze Rats before it, all adventurers are simply that, adventurers. Not everyone has to be trained up as a cleric or fighter or magic-user etc, you're just folks who have no better option than to delve for a living.

As a result, the immediate oh, let's hack this element to Knave is formatting some sort of class-analogue structure to the otherwise-class-less rules system. Among the various Discord channels this structure has come to be known as Knacks, mainly because Knack and Knave sound so canny together. Check out Laughing Leviathan's excellent Knave-Knacks and A Man With A Hammer's Knacks for Knaves for other posted variables on the formula. More are floating around, currently unpublished in various ways and means, and I highly recommend you check them out as you find them.